


Hold me til I'm not lonely anymore (it's only the crashing of the ocean to the shore)

by Negen



Category: Hemlock Grove
Genre: Angst, Apparently a single one-shot wasn't enough, F/M, French to English Translation, I Will Go Down With This Ship, I saw the fur blanket in episode 9 of season 2 and I was like "And I oop", Letha is still our favorite ghost, M/M, Nadia is cute material, happy ending ?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:46:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28157043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Negen/pseuds/Negen
Summary: "Roman has a fur blanket in the bedroom of his house full of silence and empty things. It lies on his bed, dark, lustful, thick, and when Roman looks at it sometimes, he still hesitates about why he bought it."A short analysis of Roman, featuring a fur blanket.
Relationships: Roman Godfrey/Peter Rumancek
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	Hold me til I'm not lonely anymore (it's only the crashing of the ocean to the shore)

**Author's Note:**

> This work can be read as a stand-alone or as a sequel of my previous one-shot, ["Thought I smelled your ghost in my winter coat (monsters)"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26535754). 
> 
> It was inspired by an almost invisible shot of a fur blanket on Roman's bed at the end of episode 9, season 2. I saw it, and then it was over. Like my first one-shot, this one was written in french, then translated into english. I hope there won't be too many mistakes, but if so, please do not hesitate to point them out to me ! 
> 
> The title of this one-shot is from another song by the american band The Midnight, called "Lost Boy".

**HOLD ME TIL I'M NOT LONELY ANYMORE (IT'S ONLY** **THE CRASHING OF THE OCEAN TO THE SHORE)**

x

Roman has a fur blanket in the bedroom of his house full of silence and empty things. It lies on his bed, dark, lustful, thick, and when Roman looks at it sometimes, he still hesitates about why he bought it. He got it shortly, in truth, after he moved into the modern villa that his mother called " _a contemporary abomination_ " and he described as a " _bunker against maternal atomic bombs_ ". His mother has always preferred the old buildings, the outdated architecture, the eccentric facades of the past centuries. Roman has inherited from her his own fondness for old stuff and the baroque style, and objectively, he can't say it's a flaw, but at the time he moves out, immediately after the discovery of his upir origins, of Nadia and ( _Letha_ ), he yearns to escape in every sense of the word, and starts by a physical distancing, acquiring the house with the tinted glass windows.

The family house was closed, secretive, full of narrow corridors and spiral staircases, curved woodwork and chandeliers, old-fashioned furniture. Roman fills his new home with clean lines, space, modern items of recent design. Sellers admire his choices, as do all sellers who would praise the devil's acquisitions if they could make a financial profit out of it. Roman turns a deaf ear to the amazed exclamations and concentrates on his house, on how to make it so different from his old home that he himself will feel like a different man when he enters it.  
  
The house is new, smells like new, or rather reeks of new. Roman obtains it empty, and throws himself, almost headlong, into its decoration and furnishings. Until then, he has never attached the slightest importance to the interior of a place, not even his own bedroom. The death of Letha, Nadia, the disappearance of Shelley, the shock, the transformation and ( _Peter leaving_ ) strive so hard to swallow him alive that he finds only that option to save himself. At the beginning, he furnishes the living room, and he can almost hear Olivia's sharp remarks ( _darling it's so awfully ugly it's terrible_ ) as he decides to put the sofa here, and the coffee table there, and a giant mirror next to it, without any explanation other than the pretext of liking to see it exposed that way.

He selects neutral tones, of an almost appalling gloom, and visits art galleries in the area to pick out a few paintings worthy of enough interest and take them home to cover frightfully naked walls. In reality, all the paintings he hangs are threatening, pitifully dramatic, and incomprehensible. He keeps them, because he can. Upstairs, in her small soundproof room, Nadia follows the comings and goings without ever betraying her presence, and her blue eyes always linger on Roman when he comes to see her, as if to ask him what he is doing, why he's doing it, and above all, what's his purpose. Two weeks after they moved into the house, the father still hasn't said a word to his daughter. He looks at her, sees Letha ( _I think it's time to go home_ ), and he is unable to say anything to her. The child watches him, mute, from her crib. One night, he holds out a long finger to her and she grabs it in her tiny baby hands, and moments later he finds himself crying on the floor of his empty bathroom.

x

After the living room, he moves on to the kitchen and dining room, bringing in chrome-plated counters, a gigantic refrigerator, a whole set of sophisticated cooking utensils that are destined never to be used. Everything is delivered to him after his choices in the store, and often people are surprised by the size of his house and the fact that he lives there alone. _It's quite a place you have here_ , a delivery man stupidly remarks to him, hands on hips, after bringing in the bar with two of his colleagues. He looks stupid, oppressed in this so wide and dark space, and when he raises his head to check the height of the ceiling, Roman contemplates the vein beating in his neck and bites his tongue, flooding his own mouth with blood.

He thinks of Godfrey Manor, and Peter's caravan, and the fact that he has never felt at home anywhere, except perhaps in Peter's place in a way, because there are small, cramped places where you feel more at home than in your big princely room at your childhood house, where your father killed himself in the living room and your mother reigns as a tyrant. There are huge places where you feel suffocated and narrow places where you can breathe in peace. Roman tries to recreate the comfortable atmosphere of Peter's home, and soon realizes that he will probably never succeed, because it's not so much the furniture that fills a house as the people, and Peter is far away now, and has taken away with him the cosiness and warmth and the feeling of belonging Roman had.  
  
He furnishes the kitchen, he furnishes the living room, he furnishes the corners, the bathrooms, the guest rooms, while being sure that they will never welcome anyone ( _Shelley_ ). He buys weirder, more personal objects, small invisible things that he puts in discreet places, such as a candlestick with eight curved metal branches, a replica of a Victorian house without its inhabitants, atypical statuettes, one of which represents a wolf devouring a deer, and which he saves for his bedroom, refusing to accept the slightest symbolism in it ( _tell me what you need_ ). He ends up with his bedroom. Nadia still says nothing.

He hires his old nanny to take care of her. The woman has gone through some stuff, she has the merit of knowing how to keep quiet, and she watches him fill his house with a piercing but silent expression. Between the walls of Godfrey Manor, the light was subdued, golden, crushing. In Roman's new house, it's cold and distant, as if it felt better not to venture too deeply into the home. Pale, dead, Letha occupies all the deserted corners, all the interstices that Roman forgets, and smiles as soon as he sees her, slowly, softly, and there is always something dislocated about her smile that turns her into a bogeyman.

x

He continues to fill the house with a frenzy bordering on despair. He never brings anyone in, and kills outside. As the days go by, the house, filled with furniture, is full of unspoken and inaudible whispers, and it feeds on them, while Roman plunges his fangs into the throats of strangers and makes them as mute as his home. Nadia grows up. _You should hold her a bit_ , the old nanny suggests, and Roman doesn't even have the courage to say anything cruel or mocking to her, because she's right, and so he tries, he goes into Nadia's room, lays his eyes on the kid, and the two of them gaze at each other from afar like two predators intimidated by one another, without daring to move any further ( _NADIA_ ). He doesn't take his daughter in his arms. In his head, he doesn't call her by that name. He just calls her the child, or the baby. Letha is all around her crib, and she calls them monsters.

For his bedroom, he wanders around the stores, flips through nebulous magazines with names that are all more unpronounceable than each other, accepts some random advice from Pryce, categorically refuses his mother's, hopes in vain for Shelley's. He first takes the bed, a monstrosity that occupies half the space, then crowds the room all around, with glass pedestal tables, blackwood cabinets, meaningless sculptures, flowerless vases. He buys a multitude of cushions, and even full to overflowing, the bed has a taciturn appearance. Guest rooms have the same problem. They have all the material comfort, and they do not look any more pleasant for all that. For the living room, he finds an absurd, excessive, tortured ceiling light, whose aspect, if properly interpreted, could be able to inform the whole city, the country and probably the world about the overall nature of the house.

x

He finds the blanket last, after placing everything else. He doesn't look for it, but it comes to him anyway, like the lingering smell of an old, heavy, dense perfume forgotten in a cupboard. He doesn't see it in a magazine, and no one tells him about it. He doesn't notice it in the elegant, glossy furniture stores he goes to to furnish his home ( _lair_ ). He sees it, alone, mocking, in the store front of an old Hemlock Grove store one night on his way home from the White Tower, after stopping at a red light. He doesn't really pay much attention at first, because his car breaks are always an opportunity for him to experience the emptiness of the passenger seat next to his own, and to remember the names of those who occupied it ( _Letha Shelley Peter_ ).

Sometimes Letha shows up. She just sits there and doesn't watch the road, as she used to do when he would pick her up to take her to school or elsewhere. She stares at him through her eyelashes, and her gaze is harsh, relentless, and he does everything he can not to look back at her, believing that pretending to be indifferent will prevent her from doing any harm, while knowing fully well that ghosts feed on inattention, that they are used to it, and that they have all the time in the world waiting for someone to notice them.

He spots the blanket and thinks nothing of it at first, until the flash of the headlights of an oncoming car illuminates it and passes through it, and then Roman notices the inky black color of the fur and thinks ( _they take the love from your heart tell me what you need Peter_ ). He comes back the next day, parks in front of the store, and asks to see it. The saleswoman says it's an old item, that she never really managed to sell it, not out of sentimentality, but because people " _don't want fur anymore, nowadays, they pinch their nose as soon as they see it_ ". She allows him to touch it. The fur is fake, the hairs are synthetic. Roman knows it. He buys it anyway, and accompanies it with a set of pillows of the same kind. The price is almost a daylight robbery, but he says nothing, and holds out his credit card while distractedly observing his reflection with his cheeks hollowed out in an oval mirror facing him. On his way home, he keeps the blanket on the passenger seat. It covers Letha like the world's most animalistic body bag.

He spreads it out in his bedroom, and suddenly the place takes on a different shape, becomes heavier, fills up with something other than emptiness. He arranges the cushions and spends ten minutes contemplating the final result, without fully understanding why. Quickly, things slip away from his grasp. From the moment the blanket enters the house, it becomes its mistress and marks its territory. Roman falls asleep under its weight, drags it with him into the living room during some mornings where he thinks back to the razor that has pierced the skin of his arms.

It occupies more than just his bed, and eventually possesses the entire house. It has its proper place on the sofa, where he sometimes manages to cover his legs when he watches television and zaps all the channels one after the other. He stumbles upon an animal documentary one evening, by accident, and watches for an hour a pack of wolves moving through the forests of Siberia, wrapped in black fur. The same evening, his old nanny brings Nadia, who has been crying for an hour non-stop, and she sits on an armchair while the child looks at the screen with her big blue eyes and admires the wild wolves too with a curious, interested look.

The next day, Roman wakes up, lying on the couch, snuggled in the blanket, and Nadia under his arm, sleeping confidently ( _you are a pack too_ ). It's the first time he lifts her up to put her back in her crib, and he is overcome with a confused hesitation as he sees her frowning her tiny face when the weight of the fur is no longer on top of her ( _I should buy her one_ ). During the week, he buys her a little, infinitely soft white blanket, and when he brings it to her, she greedily dips her little fingers into it and wraps herself in it, as if she were a cub, and in a way she is.

x

The cover sees everything happening. It covers Roman at night, and he curls up in it, voraciously, fiercely, makes it a nest, a kind of den, in which he shelters and seeks silence. He slides his fingers through the black fur and sometimes he draws it against his face and breathes it in. It never smells anything, but he develops a remarkable ability to imagine that it does, giving it the smell of cigarettes, of caravans, of ( _wolf_ ). In her little secret bedroom, Nadia does the same with her own blanket, and she cries furiously as soon as it is taken from her to wash it. Roman buys her another one, to compensate, but the kid refuses it, and continues to demand and shout for the return of the first one, with its fur white as the wings of an ( _angel_ ). Roman is hardly exasperated by his daughter's whim, because his is of the same nature, and he feels the same repugnance to leave the cocoon of his blanket to let it be cleaned.

Once, when Nadia cries too loudly, refuses to be fed, refuses to be cuddled, the nanny takes her to Roman's bedroom, puts her down on his bed, and lets her crawl awkwardly to the black fur blanket, where she lies down with a supreme baby satisfaction, and falls asleep there. _She's just like you_ , the old woman tells him, and Roman doesn't answer. He looks at his daughter, who cries when she doesn't have her fur, and allows the nanny to bring her into his room on nights when she doesn't want to calm down. Once on the fur, the child is as gentle as a lamb, and sometimes Roman is afraid of her, because he always ends up meeting her blue eyes, and they seem to ask him a multitude of questions that are too complex ( _where is the real fur_ ) for him to really cope with.

x

The blanket sees Miranda, and she too falls under its spell, wraps herself in it with gluttony, and Roman is bitterly jealous to see her wallowing in it. Even Nadia doesn't seem to like having to share her nest with the young woman either. On the rare occasions when the nanny brings her into Roman's room, having made sure that Miranda sleeps quietly in hers, the girl examines the blanket sternly and never fails to cast a cold look at Roman, as if he had insulted her by inviting someone else under its weight without having asked her permission first. Peter comes back ( _they take the love from your heart and the rings from your fingers_ ), and pleads Linda's cause. Roman pretends he doesn't want to see him anymore, buries his head in the sand, and faces his daughter's insistent glances while hiding under the fur. As soon as Peter returns, the dreams start again. There were others, before, under the blanket, dreams of fur and blood and wolves, but never premonitory, just languid and hungry.

Later, when Miranda introduces the baby to Peter and he takes her in his arms to admire Letha's vestige in her, Nadia stares at his face and beard insistently, and Roman sees the understanding in her eyes, the acknowledgement, the blue glow that says " _he's the fur_ ". They reconcile, Miranda between them. They don't talk about it, not because they don't want to, but because it's their way. Peter sees the fur blanket, unfolded like a queen on Roman's bed, and he says nothing ( _a gypsy is a gypsy is a gypsy_ ). The three of them sink into it, and the fur curls underneath them, bends for a while, but eventually it irretrievably regains its place, and then Miranda is not welcome in the den, even if she tries to patch things up between them, especially from the moment she tries to patch things up between them.

It's not her fault, and Nadia likes her, but sometimes Roman has the vague impression that Nadia likes this sudden surrogate mother like one likes a cow before killing it for its meat. Moreover, she always cries as soon as her white fur is taken off. Tired, on edge, Roman begins a treatment to eliminate his upir heritage. After each session, he buries himself under his blanket, and doesn't come out until much later.

x

He and Peter gradually but surely fall back into the creepy routine they had built up in high school at the time of the vargulf murders. The parameters haven't really changed, and culminate in snow and cold. Peter turns into a wolf and Roman sees him for the first time in almost a year, sees the black fur, the real one, the one on the bed, come to life and move, covering muscles, teeth, covering Peter. He is taken by the immoderate desire to sink his fingers into its thickness, to watch them disappear into it, to feel it against his face. Peter sinks his teeth into a man's throat while Roman kills the other, and everything is forgiven in violence and horror, as they both feed on their atrocity and Miranda discovers it on the white-covered floor, while at the same time understanding that her role is over.

She takes Nadia away, runs away, tries to escape their destruction and what they are together, both of them, since the beginning. They find her at Destiny's. _I was just defending myself_ , reminds her of Peter, _and Roman hates what he is_. But Miranda's face remains closed, because she has understood now, and only Nadia's blue eyes look at them both with an almost heretical phlegm, as if she had always known, and had in front of her a confirmation of her thoughts. Roman thinks about the fur blanket, about Peter's fur.

That same evening, Roman keeps Nadia against him, almost tears her away from Miranda, and she agitates her chubby arms and legs with obvious joy when he carries her. He collapses into the baby's room with his back to the wall, and as he looks at her, he sees something new, or something old that he hadn't noticed before, probably because he wasn't looking hard enough. Peter lets himself fall next to him and their two exhaustions intertwine to form a compact, almost solid mass, and Peter looks at Nadia with a loving expression that says " _mine_ ", and it changes when he meets Roman's eyes, and becomes " _ours_ " ( _you are a pack too_ ).

Roman falls asleep, the child in his arms, and vaguely feels Peter picking her up with immense gentleness to put her back in her crib. When he regains consciousness, a few moments later, Peter is calling him, and pulls him up. I thought you were gone, Roman says, half-asleep, letting himself be led to his own bedroom. Peter answers " _bad pick_ " and adds " _I'll go later, I'm too worn out for now_ ".

They lie together on the bed, lazily, against each other, and Roman buries his face in Peter's neck, inhales deeply the smell of snow and blood from his skin, vibrates when he feels Peter's hand moving up his spine ( _they take the love from your heart_ ). Peter's cheek presses against his hair. _You have a fur blanket_ , he whispers in a muffled, exhausted voice. Half conscious, without saying anything, because it doesn't matter, and because Peter knows, Roman somehow knows he knows, he has to, Roman raises his chin to kiss him on the lips, and feels him respond to his touch.

The blanket is spread all over them, warm, wild, lavish. Nadia is safe under hers. The house is plunged into darkness and silence. _Our lair_ , Roman thinks foolishly, with devotion, while Peter breathes against him, an arm around his waist, while Nadia sleeps wrapped in her fur, and the three of them are together, with no one around to threaten them.


End file.
